


reconciliation

by CosmicTurnabout



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, Patch 5.0: Shadowbringers Spoilers, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24541294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CosmicTurnabout/pseuds/CosmicTurnabout
Summary: It is the hero’s darkest hour, and cruel as always in his kindness, Emet-Selch gives her a choice.
Relationships: Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 14
Kudos: 30





	reconciliation

Seconds after the doors of the Capitol building swing open to admit the hero, a wave of nausea rolls in on her heels, soul-sickening, corrosive. Even here, many fulms away, Emet-Selch can feel the light eating away at her. He can make out the tendrils of it clinging to her legs, her arms, bubbles of it dripping viscous into her very soul.

She has a determined walk, a determined expression on her face despite the extreme pain she must be suffering. _She is so small_ , Emet-Selch thinks as she struts toward him, _she is so small and sick and desperate_. It gives him a thrill, to see her like this. How he loves to see the world reflected back to him as it is in his mind.

And yet there is some pity in the swirl of his emotions as well. He senses true greatness in her, though unrealized. She could have been so much more, his own right hand, if only she had been receptive to him and his ideals. 

The Warrior of Darkness is Lalafellin. Her light brown hair is cropped short, and she wears a circlet with feathery wings pointing upward on either side of her head, like a dog’s ears tasting the wind for sound—she has always been alert, perceptive. She is dressed in the robes of a white mage; she is unusually adept with the magic of succor. It has made her popular here on the First. She would have been a folk hero for her acts of kindness, visiting far-flung villages to heal the ailing and infirm, even had she not brought back the night.

“You took me up on my offer,” he says, spreading his hands in half-hearted welcome. “And here I was beginning to think you wanted to die alone.”

“I am still not sure I do not want to,” she says, her voice coming rough and unsteady, and he is not surprised, not surprised at all. She will die soon.

“No mortal wants to die alone.”

“Yet we all do, in the end.” She winces, another flash of pain worming through her chest. He can see its claws drifting ever nearer to her heart, spreading like cracks in earth. “You know that well, don’t you, Emet-Selch?”

“You dare presume to know what I know?” he sneers. “You are a fool. I told you I would let you die with dignity, and I keep my promises.” He sighs. “I have a gift for you, as it were.”

“And what... does that mean?” she asks, doubt ringing in her voice, but she steps forward anyway. He is standing in the center of the grand entrance chamber of the Capitol. Soon she will be a mere yalm or two from him, and he will see her up close, and he will decide whether to take pity on her or make her his lapdog. _Like I did with Vauthry_ , he thinks. _She will be a wonderful Lightwarden. A pet to scratch and reward for obedience._

“How are you feeling?” he asks, avoiding her question for the nonce. It should be quiet enough to hear dust settle; the building seems to suck away nearly all sound into its shadowed corners. Sometimes the city does things he could never have predicted, things it never did in life. He knows it, and yet he learns it anew every day.

“Like hell,” she admits with a croak of a laugh. “Why? Is this gift of yours a cure for what ails me?”

“Hardly, but I imagine it will make you happy.” 

“I would not have expected you to be kind, here at the end.”

“Kind, no. Fair, now that you have conceded? Yes, I think I can be fair.”

“Conceded.” She sounds sad of a sudden. “I suppose that is what I have done. But it hurts. It hurts so much. What can I do, in the face of such pain? How can anyone stand on their own two feet under the weight of such suffering?”

For the Warrior of Darkness to tell him that, to lay bare her pain so openly, she must be battling a great and terrible force. If he had to describe it, he would say the light waxes and wanes in her like a roiling sea; there is high tide and low tide, a microcosm of the Flood that devastated the First. Right now it wanes, letting her keep her head above water, but for how long? 

“You would be surprised. How did you get away from your fellow Scions, pray?”

“I weaved a ward of aether around them right outside the Ondo Cups,” she says, somewhat giddily. “They wanted to save me, of course, but... I knew. Nothing can be done. They won’t be able to break out of the warding for hours. Long enough for me to...”

 _Long enough for me to come here and die_ , he finishes for her. _In Amaurot, a great grand mausoleum for the ancient world._

“Clever,” Emet-Selch says. “Very clever.” She is close enough now to see clearly. She looks tired, haggard, more outwardly affected by the light’s poisoning than he had first assumed—before, when she had entered the building, the light raging within her had been her most salient attribute, but that had all been aethersight. Mayhap this close to death she feels akin to him. Will he grant her mercy, or will he let her be his dog? There is time yet to think it over. “So you will leave the shard to them, though it is all but hopeless?” 

“It is never hopeless. I said I was in pain, not despair. Pain is debilitating, but there are worse things. And I care little for my own pain.”

“But cooling pain is a white mage’s highest calling. How could there be aught worse than pain?” He does not subscribe to this school of thought, precisely, but the memory of debating in this place has caught him up, and he bends to it ever so slightly. 

“One person buckling under the yoke of pain is a tragedy, but it is not enough to stop the world from moving. Mayhap the First does not need the Warrior of Darkness to win. Mayhap I have done enough, and the people will come together, and finish what I have started.”

“Surely you do not really believe that. Not even you could be so _dreadfully_ optimistic.” 

“If I did not believe in the people of the First, I would have left them to their fate. We must believe that people can go on without us, that they can carry the torch of our convictions when we are dust, or else why act at all?”

“Mayhap you are right,” he allows with a bitter humor. What a strange philosophy, and coming so lucidly from one immersed in such a black pit of suffering. _What could I learn from her, were she to become a Lightwarden?_ He shakes his head. “Tell me. Do you remember debating in this very hall? It was not the regular venue for such things, but we were wont to give impassioned speeches here, and to respond to the arguments of our detractors.”

For the first time she looks confused. “We? What are you talking about?”

He has made a decision. “Come, little wanderer,” Emet-Selch says, “and you will understand. I will show you a sight worth seeing before you die.”

Kora hesitates for a moment, then walks forward to close the gap between them, boots ringing like chimes on the cold hard tiles. This is not to please him, of course, but to do something—anything—with her own body. It is like he can see into her mind. The good are always so predictable. They come, they endeavor to drive evil out of the land, they leave on the west wind. If they do not leave on their own accord, they die. 

“Here I am,” she says absently. The light poisoning waxes suddenly, and now she is doll-like again, firm and mechanical.

“Good, good,” says Emet-Selch, sensing her within the range of his aetherial manipulation magicks. He raises his hand, snaps his fingers, and with a shifting of air around them they are somewhere else altogether.

Teleportation is an unstable technique in general, but this Amaurot is his, made completely under his own auspices, and it is easy enough to travel about it even with a passenger in tow. Nothing has ever been so much a part of him, so self-defining by its very nature; surely the people who will uncover it ages and ages from now, with no inkling of his name, will say: “this was the work of Emet-Selch, this was his gift to us, and we are unworthy of it, and always will be.”

He has taken Kora to a cliff overlooking the lights and spires and plazas of his artificial Amaurot. Artificial, yet beautiful; a nigh-perfect recreation from memory. Kora gazes out over it, and her mouth opens slightly, but her eyes are glassy and beginning to mist over. Already she is drifting down that long blinding road to annihilation, but he thinks she can still perceive her surroundings. Most importantly, she can still hear him. 

“This is Amaurot, as I know it,” he says reverently. “This is my home. It is where the Ascians were born, you could say.”

He has seen it so many times, and yet his voice still catches on the name; it is _entirely_ his; he feels everything that goes on down and down to the very stones the ancients tread. The shades pull at him as they navigate the labyrinthine paths he has designed so meticulously, hundreds of marionette strings veining through his body. _The windows in every building are my eyes,_ he thinks, _those curling spires, my very fingers. The arch of a roof is my eyebrow, and I walk through the city on legs of trees._ He feels the street lamps flare to life as darkness falls true, like little craters of heat in his blood, and they kiss him over and over again, under the skin, part of his skin.

It is a joyous feeling. No lover could satisfy him half so well as this connection to Amaurot and its shades, its pulsing luminous life. Looking at Kora, though, at her placid face, he thinks mayhap it would be something to behold the city with a kindred spirit, someone who could share memories and pluck at marionette ancients with a familiar sort of playfulness. Mayhap she will awaken, remember herself fully, and then...

He begins to point out certain areas to her, letting the words ghost over her ears, her feathery wings pricked up over the wave of light lapping about her neck. The Akadaemia Anyder, the Achora Heights, the Polyleritae District. He knows them so well, and when he says their names, they light up in his mind, beacons for his love, his devotion. They are the reason he breathes. They are the reason he endeavors to do anything about the sad march of history and its destructive ripples through time. _See_ , he thinks, _you did not pluck this place from my memory, Hydaelyn, you did not take_ everything _from me after all._

At some point she shudders next to him, a shimmering sort of aura erupting around her. She grunts, a small, half-animal sound. Her skin flexes with light, first slowly, then faster and faster like a chameleon changing its scales. Fluid the color of melted gold begins to flow out of her mouth in thick globs. The light is at high tide. She is corroding from the inside out, and still she listens.

“You are Amaurotine,” he says with the casual tone of one reporting the weather. “Eons ago, you were one of us. You have forgotten that fact, sundered as you are, but I think you are starting to remember.”

“I was one of you,” she says, rote.

“Yes.”

“This city... it looks familiar. More familiar, from up here.”

“Yes! Yes, it should. Look closely. Is there anywhere in particular that calls to you?” 

Kora is sitting now, hands clasped over her knees, and her head swings back and forth, surveying. Finally she stops, extending one arm and pointing in the direction of the Macarenses Angle.

“What about that place sings to you, my foolish hero?”

“I think, once... I walked there.” She sounds amazed, her mouth finding it somewhat hard to form words around the light dribbling out. “I can feel the stones beneath my feet. There is a... there is a crack somewhere in the paving, and as a child I tripped on it, and almost fell.”

Emet-Selch feels pride erupt in him at having gotten the replica so exact as to trigger this memory, and new appreciation for the hero rushes in with it, unbidden. No matter.

“When you become a Lightwarden, I will let you live here. You will be mine to watch over.” He smiles. He means “control,” but she can hardly know that. “It is the best thing that could happen to you at this point. Will it not be fine, my hero, to live in this city you remember with such childlike wonder? To guard over it?”

“I will be a faerie tale creature.” She giggles, light-inebriated, more bile spilling over her lips. “I will jump from building to building, and light will bloom beneath my paws.”

“You will put new stars in the sky.” _And hold them there for me._

The light wanes. “But,” she says, and her eyes suddenly become hard as she turns, “I will do it alone. If I am to live here, I never want to see you again.”

This irks him somewhat, but he does not let it show. Of course she would be able to push through the poisoning thus; only she could be so damned stubborn. “Why, whatever could you mean? I made this place. You will live in it under my auspices, or not at all.”

“We are enemies. You... you did this to me in the first place.”

“I did not order you to seek out the Lightwardens, nor did I demand you absorb their light. That was all your doing, Warrior of Darkness.”

“Always deflecting, Emet-Selch. Always deflecting.” Kora’s voice has changed timbre now, even with light at low tide. It is a real struggle for her to speak. “You insult me. Your actions _caused_ the flood of light. You set the cogs in motion for the First’s near destruction. Shall we blame the guillotine for the death of a convict, instead of the man who lets the blade fall? Spare me your holier-than-thou ‘I had no hand in this’ blather.”

“Would you prefer I kill you, then? I would rather not, but I can.”

She makes no answer. Mayhap the pain is finally stilling her tongue. As it should. Part Amaurotine she might be, but her place now is to listen, and obey.

“That’s right,” he says cruelly. “Accept your fate as a Lightwarden, and live your faerie tale dream as an aloof beast of wonder. Or die as a kind fool, useless and weak, if that is truly what you desire. Either one, I can grant you.”

She is silent. The light waxes.

“Damn it all, you must answer me.” He will not let her be crushed under the light before he has her decision. “Make your choice. I will not make it for you.”

He lifts her to eye level with Wind and then grabs her face, her small round face, and sees her eyes rolling in their sockets. She is not a part of this world anymore— _I am not a part of this world_ —and as he thinks that, he is overcome by strongest curiosity. He delves her with aether, and... he truly _sees_ her for the first time. In all her splendor.

She... is... whole! Or very nearly whole enough as makes no difference—she is Amaurotine! Well, yes, he already knew that, did he not? But he had never thought she was... is...! In front of him is the last soul he ever could have imagined. This mending of her being must have happened while on the First. He had missed it until now. And his heart burns, it leaps for joy, it plunges into a cold black pool of despair.

He utters her name. Her true name. Her mortal name is a false moniker, ugly and crude. Her eyes settle. For a painfully beautiful second he thinks she is responding to his words.

“Stop... spouting nonsense.”

She does not know who she is, she does not know who _he_ is, and he feels an abyssal stab of fear that she will never know.

“Tell me,” he says, a desperate note entering his voice, “tell me. Do you know my name?”

“Emet-Selch,” she says, woozy.

“No, damn you!” Anger and deepest frustration prick his brain like sharp needles. “My true name. I have another, hero. You should know it. You _do_ know it. Once”—and here he falters, someone else speaks for him—“once, you loved me.” Where had that come from? That was another him; it may as well have been, echoing from the impossibly distant past.

The Lalafell blinks and sways in the air, held up only by strands of Wind aether. Her eyebrows scrunch down in confusion.

“Never,” she nearly whispers. “Never... love you...”

“No,” he says futilely, grabbing at her shoulders, something Emet-Selch would never have done. “You did. You _do_. Damn you, you do!” 

“I hate you, Emet-Selch,” she says. She coughs up bile that looks like light incarnate, and it splatters on his coat. “I reject you. I... reject everything that you are.” In that moment, her aura is beautiful; the tragedy of it all overcomes him—oh _damn_ him to their seven bloody hells, she was...!—no, he can’t say her name again, he cannot bear that rejection. He feels if she denies him twice, he will crumble.

_I’ve hated her and her ilk for so long, but I never knew—forgive me, I never knew_. It is hard to fight against a wall of hate, and hate and a new suffocating grief well up at the same time in him, and like a dry shoreline yielding to a stubborn river, he loses a chunk of himself in the mix.

“My name is Hades.” His throat is parched. He feels like he is floating above his own body watching this conversation unfold, watching it happen to someone else.

“I do not... care what your name is.” She coughs.

“Just say it. ‘Hades.’ Pray give it a try, hero, you’ve nothing else to lose.” 

“Never. No.”

“If you do, you may remember. You are—so—close to remembering. Don’t play the stubborn fool with me. Wouldn’t you like to remember something glorious, before you die?” 

“I... I do not want to remember.” She coughs again. There is so much gold on the ground now that it has formed a puddle, and it spreads far enough to touch Emet-Selch’s boots. “I have remembered enough.”

“This city is my gift to you. This view. If you were to remember your heritage, this image would jump out at you one hundred times more clearly. You would not just _see_ Amaurot—you would be able to touch it. I would allow you that privilege.” He stretches his arms out, and feels the city stretch too, flexing its wings. 

“I don’t... want the city.” She shakes her head. “Not if you are here. Nothing you can do for me... is a bloody _privilege_.”

Clouds are gathering over Amaurot now, artificial clouds, and they smear the lights from the buildings into a sweaty haze. The light in her swells, answering, overtaking her entire.

“I can make the dying easier for you,” he says suddenly. Stupidly. This had never been part of his plan. _I want to watch her die_ , he thinks. _I did want to watch her die, and live again as a Lightwarden_. “Or I can accelerate the transformation. Once you are transformed, the pain—“

He stops speaking, because the look on her face has become something vile, twisted by the pure essence of light, which at its core is a cold, alien thing.

“I wish it were happening to you,” she spits. “I wish I were watching _you_ die like this.”

The sky, black and oppressive, contracts overhead, then comes down in a vortex. Betrayal. Hatred. He blinks. Something about those words... Red creepers shoot up from deep within his chest and snap tight around his mind. Then aether forms into a thick sharp spear in his hand, faster than he can imagine, and he—he thrusts it forward—he? no, Emet-Selch thrusts it forward, and he’s saying “no” quietly, like a sigh, like something he cannot help but voice. But before he can take it back, it is through, the white spear has pierced her chest and arced away into the distance. She dies just like that; from his rage, not his pity. The light pumps out of her in great gouts, shining against the backdrop of the city. It obscures the blood, covering the ground in bulging globs that quiver and coalesce into a puddle of bubbling gold. And then even that is gone in seconds, floating away in tiny sparkling pinpricks to dissolve into nothingness. Only her body, and the blood, is left behind. He releases the bonds of Wind aether, lets her drop. He had not thought a body would be left behind.

He falls to his knees next to her, tired, fighting with something inside his very soul. This is what he wanted, undoubtedly— _Hades or Emet-Selch?; no, no, I am Hades I am Hades I am Hades, “Emet-Selch” is a bloody_ title _!_ —this is true, and yet Hades is practically a different being altogether, lost in the past, looking out at the present through Emet-Selch’s eyes. He knows that, he’s known it all along, but it has never been so obvious as it is now. Emet-Selch is the cruel one, and in a way he is the only one who exists; Hades can do nothing but protest feebly against this stranger in his own skin. Emet-Selch breathes in deep— _you see? you think of yourself as Emet-Selch, not Hades_ —and tries to calm his wild mind, but he cannot. Like a face pressing into plaster mold, that self that is “Hades” pushes against the pliant bounds of his heart from a deep, nigh-forgotten pit inside, but it can never break out into the fleshy solid world again, the world of blacks and whites and grays, and eventually it contents itself to leave only an indentation, a reminder that it was there—and nothing else.

He wants to laugh. _Thinking I could never change, after so long!_ After thousands and thousands of years, how _could_ one be the same person they were at birth? _Person? Person, is that what you are? Yes, one person_. Being, entity, whatever suits the mood. It has never been a question of two different personalities—it has always been a question of who he is at any given time. Hades lurks in the past, Emet-Selch occupies the now, the present, and will forevermore. Little chance that any other Ascian will wear the title at this point! He can take pride in the name “Hades,” but it is a shade, just like his precious marionette ancients; a small creeping thing that comes out only in the dark, and it is his true name no longer. 

It occurs to him that he might be going mad, right here, right next to the corpse of the Warrior of Darkness. _The corpse of my... no! This thing is not her! This was never really her, fool that you are_! There is a heaviness behind the bridge of his nose, a most unwelcome and unfamiliar sensation, but one he nonetheless recognizes from eons and eons ago.

_I will let it happen this once_ , he thinks, _and when it passes, I will never give in to it again_. And the tears begin to fall, large and heavy and leached from his soul out of spite, like a poison, like the light corroding the Warrior of Darkness. The tears, duplicitous, emerge as jewels to splash on the ground, becoming tiny dark points that pick out a chaotic constellation for his sorrow. He does not know why he weeps, exactly, but someone should mourn for Hades, he thinks, someone should mourn his earnest pursuit of knowledge, his devotion to his kin, and yes, even his love, pure and foolish in its naïveté. 

He bleeds those beautifully devious tears, and thinks his empty, nothing little thoughts about love and death and self-sacrifice until the well is drained.

When it is over, and Emet-Selch returns, he picks himself up off the ground, brushes dust from his coat with quick fingers, runs a hand through his hair. The hand stays fixed to his scalp, clenching against it. _You’ve had your time to cry, like a child snatched from its mother’s breast too soon, but now you must think_. That was a stupid move, an immensely stupid move—killing her—but it is done, and there is nothing for it but to trudge onward. This will all lead to the same outcome, if not by the most ideal route. Despite her idiotic optimism, this shard is doomed, and it will collapse, bringing another Ardor with it. He nods to himself. The way is still clear. _You are not allowed to go mad just yet, Emet-Selch_.

But first.

He feels he cannot leave the Warrior of Darkness’s body here, and after a moment’s contemplation he bends down to pick Kora up. Part of him curses the futile gentleness of the gesture. She is so light that he barely has to expend any energy; he can hold her easily in one arm. Touching her now he feels no affinity, no spark of connection whatsoever; he can almost believe there was nothing there to begin with, no soul he ever recognized, no colors to meld with his. But still he is urged toward some kind of action, because her soul had something of the sacred to it, and Emet-Selch does not let sacred things fade into oblivion.

“Where will I bury you, little pilgrim?” he asks her dead face, not unkindly. There is no use for kindness now, but neither is there use for cruelty. _When did I decide to bury her_? _She navigates the Lifestream, far away from this realm. She is beyond me, perhaps something_ greater _than me, and she cannot fix me with her gaze any longer._

A sudden gust of wind moves her hair, and it brushes his arm with soft fingers. In a way she is part of the city now, and still alive, with that spurious kind of life sometimes ascribed to artifacts that have seen the world change around them. Hate and love together, such a clash of emotion over one single soul—no, there is no such thing as a small soul or a large soul, he knows, there are only colors—but hers had an immensity to it, a luminosity of color rarely seen even in... even in ancients. 

He knows what to do. 

He teleports into Amaurot proper, to a path leading past the Capitol building and angling toward several main plazas. The strings tying him to nearby ancients relax, then pull taut as he walks by. They pay him no mind; they are used to him traversing the streets alone. The buildings look down as always, eyes open, heads caressing the dark velvet sky.

“You journeyed too far,” he tuts. He strays from the path, veering into a stand of trees. “You made a valiant effort, but you overextended, and fell from on high. Indeed, you reached for the stars like few have. I would have given them to you if you had truly wanted them, but alas, you did not ask. Quite like you to be so stubborn.”

_Where has this levity come from_? he thinks. _Can I finally talk to her, soul to soul, now that I know who she was, now that I know she is dead_? It makes no sense. _She said I talked too much. That I loved to hear my own voice. I suppose I do, at that. But why should I not, if I am the only one saying anything worth hearing_? The smile on his face, once neutral, turns grudging.

_ I shall bury her, and a chunk of myself alongside, and we shall both of us bloom bright in the gardens of memory. _

He walks forward, further into the copse, talking to her still. Talking to no one. “‘It is enough to make one laugh, is it not? In the end, you came home. There are very few heroes who manage to do that after a journey such as yours. I suppose even you have earned your long peace. I can admit that.” He stops walking. “The least I can do for you now is lay you to rest in Amaurot’s heart, in a place you remember well.” Hades would have wanted it so.

They are right next to the Macarenses Angle, near a conspicuous crack in the pavement. He sets the hero carefully down in the grass, and with long tendrils of aether, begins to dig.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this and feel so inclined, please join this lovely book club and yell about villains with me! https://discord.gg/FB8hqkD


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